Hillary Clinton on Tuesday painted Russia’s actions in the Ukraine as an affront to “our values” that will set a dangerous precedent if left unpunished.

And as she weighs a presidential bid, Clinton said she feels an “obligation” to help “the children of my country.”

The former secretary of state and likely 2016 Democratic contender made the remarks as part of a wide-ranging speech and subsequent question-and-answer session during an event hosted by the Board of Trade of Metropolitan Montreal, in Canada. Her remarks came hours after Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed the Ukrainian region of Crimea for Russia.

“I hope there’s not another Cold War,” she said, when asked if that was how she saw the conflict playing out. “Obviously, nobody wants to see that. I think that’s primarily up to Putin.”

The United States earlier this week announced some sanctions targeting officials tied to the crisis on Monday, to mixed reviews.

Clinton, who recently likened Putin’s moves in the Ukraine to those of Adolf Hitler’s in the 1930s, warned that allowing Russia to escape relatively unscathed from its actions in the Ukraine sends a problematic message.

Dripping sarcasm, she continued, “It’s not because we gave the poor little Baltic states NATO protection. And people need to say that, and they need to be very clear: This is a clash of values and it’s an effort by Putin to rewrite the boundaries of post-World War II Europe. If he’s allowed to get away with that, then I think you’ll see a lot of other countries either directly facing Russian aggression or suborned with their political systems so that they’re so intimidated, they’re in effect transformed into vassals, not sovereign democracies.”

The issue requires “visionary leadership,” she said, adding that Europe — especially Germany — is dependent on Russia for energy.

“How far this aggressiveness goes, I think, is really up to us,” she said. “I would like to see us accelerating the development of pipelines from Azerbaijan up into Europe, I’d like to see us looking for ways to accelerate internal domestic production [in places like Poland] … and just really go at this in a self-interested, smart way. Russians can only intimidate you if you’re dependent upon them.”

Clinton added that there’s no need to “be rattling sabers, that’s not useful. But people need to get moving in protecting themselves against future intimidation.”

The tough tone Clinton took on Russia deviated from much of the rest of her remarks, which lasted more than an hour.

Asked about her next steps — Clinton has signaled she could make a decision about running for president this year — she reiterated that she hasn’t made up her mind yet. But she said she will “continue to do everything I can to respond to these legitimate needs and concerns of people I have worked with and represented.”

“Of course, I feel a deep sense of commitment to my country and its future. As part of that I feel an obligation to do all I can for the children of my country, boys and girls alike,” she said, noting that she comes from a “middle-class family” from the Midwest.

“I’m just a very typical example of what we were provided: great public schools, public parks. We had problems of course … but there was a strain in our DNA going back generations that hard work, opportunity, mobility, success could be yours, however you defined it. And I don’t want to see that diminish, let alone, heaven forbid, disappear.”

Clinton focused the bulk of her speech on the importance of advancing women and girls around the world, and sought to inject that theme frequently as she fielded questions.

Asked about how women can change politics, she pointed to Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), who hammered out a budget deal with Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) late last year.

“I am convinced that Patty’s relationship-building with Paul Ryan laid the foundation for the budget,” she said. “It wasn’t like, ‘OK, come on, Paul, you bring your aides, I’ll bring mine, we’ll meet at high noon and shoot it out.’ It was, ‘Let’s sit down the two of us. Let’s have breakfast. Tell me about what you think and feel and what you want and I’ll tell you what I want.’ So they began to see each other as human beings, not as partisans.”

Boosting women globally is a favorite issue of Clinton’s, who has an initiative dedicated to that goal called No Ceilings through her family’s foundation. She often discusses the assets women bring to issues ranging from business to peacemaking. But in her Tuesday address, her remarks were more personal than usual.

For example, asked about paid maternity leave — something she staunchly supports — Clinton devoted time to describing her own experience, as a young female lawyer at a firm where she was “certainly the first partner who had ever gotten pregnant.”

“All of my male partners just stopped looking at me around the fourth or fifth month,” she said to laughs. “I think they thought, well, somehow this is going to pass, and we won’t have to deal with it.”

Clinton, noting that, at the time, she was also the first lady of Arkansas, was able to take maternity leave “so long as it didn’t set a precedent for anybody else,” she said.

“It is so out-of-step with the rest of the developed world, it is so wrong-headed about the importance of, frankly, nurturing children and supporting parents in their parenting responsibilities, and it’s wrong about the economic effects,” she said, when asked why America lacked a national policy on paid maternity leave. “… I think ultimately this needs to be a political agenda item that we just keep hammering and try to make the case for and put it on the books so we’re no longer the only industrialized nation without any kind of paid required leave.”

As she has done in the past, she urged young women looking to move up to heed the words of Eleanor Roosevelt and “grow skin like a rhinoceros.” Clinton also told the story of a female high school student who urged her to pursue a Senate bid, which she ultimately did twice, successfully, though she said she was “not a politician, I had to really work at it.”